close up - Monoskop

32 CLOSE UP
distinction, differentiating those who are qualified to talk of cinema from those
who are not. By extension this distinction will then serve to single out those
who, by virtue of their sensitivity to photogenic, are qualified to make cinema and
so install them in a position of cultural power over those who merely
manufacture cinema, however professionally. 9
Willemen sees in photogenic both a groping towards, and at the same time a refusal of,
the theory of spectatorship eventually articulated in the 1960s by Christian Metz in
'The Imaginary Signified. 1() Willemen defends the notion on the ground that, however
wilfully misguided it may have been, it at least took the unconscious dimension of
cinema spectatorship seriously. Its proponents did not attempt to domesticate the
unconscious through a set of procedures as the Surrealists did: for example, in their
strategies for rendering the unconscious representable through such techniques as
automatic writing. In Close Up, it is possible to see both the claim to skilled
spectatorship and also the disavowal of its more disturbing connotations.
If the version of discriminating and inspired spectatorship implied by photogenic
was indeed at the core of Close Up's modernist aesthetic of cinema, that in itself may
explain why its project quite quickly became unsustainable. But it is also important to
note the external factors which undermined the ideal cinema Macpherson, Bryher
and their colleagues envisaged. The economic and industrial conditions which made it
possible to produce experimental films disappeared with the coming of sound. The
rise of fascism in Germany, and of Stalinism and socialist realism in the Soviet Union,
also brought into much sharper focus the choice between aesthetic radicalism and
political commitment for avant-garde film-makers.
One key moment indicates that, even though Close t//>'s catholic eclecticism may
have just about been viable in 1927, the opposition between two avant-gardes
projected backwards by Peter Wollen had become a reality by the turn of the decade.
The event was the first International Congress of Independent Cinematography held
at La Sarraz, Zurich, in September 1929. 11 Its topic was 'The Art of Cinema, Its
Social and Aesthetic Purposes'. Although the organizers hoped that the Congress
would lead to the creation of an international film-making co-operative, the delegates
declared 'as an absolute principle, the difference in practice and spirit between the
independent cinema and the commercial cinema'. 'Art cinema' thus began to emerge
as a constrained and marginalized category separate from the mainstream commercial
industry. The second, and final, meeting of the Congress in Brussels in 1930 went
further in writing an obituary for the sort of'film for film's sake' to which Close Up
was committed. It recognized that 'the Avant Garde as a purely aesthetic movement
had passed its climax and was on the way to concentrating on the social and political
film, mainly in documentary form'. 12 The first movement 'expired', according to Hans
Richter, because political tensions 'made poetry no longer suitable'. Artists working in
film increasingly decided to adopt a more practical commitment to social action: 'Our
age demands the documented fact.' Whether Richter envisaged as part of this new
cinematic era the silencing of Vertov and the exile and recantation of Eisenstein in the
Soviet Union, Leni Riefenstahl's staged song-and-dance paeans to Nazism, or the
social democratic vision of John Grierson in Britain, is of course unlikely. But the